Foster Further

Today I took the kids to play at a park on the "wrong" side of town. Not actually that sketchy of a neighborhood but, nonetheless, not my usual stomping ground. We were there just a few minute when a young black boy came up to us. He was extremely friendly and immediately started playing with my kids. He helpfully offered to watch one of them on the play structure when I was busy pushing two on the swings. After a bit my kids were hungry so we went up to the pavilion to eat the lunch I'd packed. In less than a minute he was there, too. I offered him some of our snacks and he politely accepted one. By the end of the meal he was sitting next to me eating most of the food I'd brought talking my ear off. As I packed up our stuff and the toddlers scampered off to play some more I saw him share his last carrot sticks with his two older sisters who'd remained a little ways off. While we were playing after lunch a group of young white businessmen came to the pavilio...

Theo and I nearly became foster care parents about five years ago. There was a child in my classroom who was in foster care and I felt this deep burden to bring him, or others like him, into a true home with a real family not a semi-group home with a sharp divide between the "real" kids and the "foster" kids as I knew was the case for this boy. I told my husband that we could do it better. So we started the process. And then quit. Because we weren't ready to do it better. We weren't mature enough, our marriage wasn't strong enough, our kids were too young. On the first night that the girls were with us I sent a panicked, rambling voicemail to their social worker, repeating and spelling out letter-by-letter my name and the girls' names three times (because we got the girls before we even met their worker since they came from another agency), begging her to please call their mother and tell her that they were okay. The realization that another moth...